In fairness, I called out a few of the traits as problematic. They don't seem to correlate with most people's understanding of what money is and are more weighted towards the characteristics of bitcoin/ crypto.
We're increasingly going toward an ever digital future Leo. Surely if those things present as sound characteristics for money, they should be included? Just because they didn't exist as characteristics back in the day shouldn't preclude their consideration.
Problem there is none of my peers use it, and I work in IT a group you'd think among the more likely to embrace crypto! Peer-to-peer is also a small share of total transactions.
Ok, but in what context is this being tackled? Kelleher is right that Bitcoin can be transacted simply from one party to another (without intermediation). That is a characteristic. That there is little adoption as a means of exchange is separate from the actual characteristic. Notwithstanding that, he addresses that lack of adoption as a medium of exchange. So have I here on many occasions. To me, it's store of value use case first - then means of exchange but only if innovators work on improving usability and second layer solutions like Lighning Network actually come through.
They could, but for many people that is not easy. Getting real money out of crypto isn't straightforward either with banks shutting down accounts or blocking transactions with exchanges. This seems to be focusing on what's theoretically possible then and not reality now or any time soon. For a large chunk of the world population it's about to get a lot more difficult as well if India pass the legislation they are working on to make it a criminal offence to trade in cryptos with a minimum 1 year jail term.
Your point stands but bear in mind he's referring to a characteristic - so as a characteristic its valid too. He's looking at fundamentals.
We've discussed the issue of getting money in and out of crypto - and as I mentioned before, for sure - you're quite right - it's a difficulty. However, as I mentioned to you the last day, day by day I become more comfortable with the notion of not having to and not wanting to. People are never going to be 'all-in' on crypto. We all inherited a FIAT world - so of course people will have both. Who's to say that they're not comfortable with leaving a portion of their funds within crypto?
Let me qualify that. I'm not talking about having large holdings of Bitcoin. You can of course invest in/buy/earn Bitcoin but you don't have to be exposed to the volatility that (currently) comes with it. Over the course of the past few months, there have been billions added to the overall stablecoin balance sheet - largely by people who have no other interest in crypto. They just want to get in to dollars as there's a shortage of Euro-dollars. Some of them also want to escape volatility in their own sovereign currencies and get some of their capital out of the local system.
In tandem with all of that, I'm trying to watch closely the Ethereum-driven DeFi space and the savings products that are coming out of that. To me, all that is far too risky right now but I'm sure they'll work it out. If you have access to all of that - and its functional - who needs to take it out of that eco-system (if it doesn't represent ALL of a persons funds)?
Other than that, products will develop to assist with the gap where crypto meets FIAT. There are a multitude of credit and debit cards available now that are targetted exclusively at that market.
As regards government action, as we discussed recently I'm in agreement that we will see pushback. We've already been through the preliminary rounds of it. Governments have already flip flopped their position on it as they don't know how to handle it. There will be more of that for years to come - that's guaranteed. You cite India as an example and that's interesting as just a few weeks ago, they rolled back positively towards crypto, instructing their banks to bank crypto companies having taken a harder line before that.
That doesn't make sense to me, and I work with IoT and microservices. Do you expect it ever to be economically viable for a company to invoice for a per-use service for less than 1c? If not where's the value here? Why is the current model of rounding to the nearest cent broken?
Well, right now, it's not cost effective to transact micro-payments. Visa/conventional means can't support that (largely due to fees). In fairness, it remains to be seen if Bitcoin can do any better as with LN, there will still be fees. It could be left to a truly fee-less cryptocurrency to tackle that.
But in answer to your question, do I think there will be gazillions of micro-transactions in the near future? Absolutely. Year on year, gazillions of IoT devices are being rolled out. With that, they're going to be collecting valuable data. Lets say you have a digital wallet in a car for example. The car can collect data about pot holes or traffic, etc. That data on an individual basis would be worth little - but over an entire car fleet, its a lot - and the power of it is a beautiful thing. That data can be sold and the same digital wallet could be used for different things. eg. car passes through toll and the digital wallet pays toll fee automatically with the very same crypto.
I don't know, you'd probably need to ask Brendan....I haven't been peaking at his notes
I guess it will be Christmas before we know it - who knows what gifts that might bring. I'm ever the optimist.